Work Text:
It starts the way many things do: quietly. He is buying dog food, caught between two brands in the back aisle of the local supermarket, when the first one crawls over. He doesn’t notice it at first, until it nudges against his leg. He startles and glances down, and it in turn is staring up at him, eyes wide. The silence is mutual. He isn’t sure what to do or what to say, so they stay locked like that for several moments. It doesn’t end until a frenzied young mother rushes over and scoops the thing up, tells it that it scared her half to death and never to do it again. She pays him no mind and hurries off. Vaguely, he registers the sound of it crying in the distance. He decides on a middle of the range brand and journeys home against the bite of the cold wind, feeling strangely warmer than he should. He sets the incident aside and falls to sleep quickly and heavily.
When he wakes, it is all but forgotten.
* * * *
The next time, or at least the next time that he is conscious of, he is standing in the hallway at the lab. He is waiting for Jack to come back to him with a yell and a comment on getting too attached to the case. He is alone but for the lady several meters down bouncing a baby in her arms. It’s not difficult to deduce that she has brought the child in to show it off to her colleagues – the weight around her middle hints at maternity leave and her waving through the glass at forensics analysis is easy to interpret as familiarity. The baby is a round little thing, all chubby arms and tiny feet and quivering lips. He catches the exact moment it registers his presence – those same chubby arms reach out to him and the squealing noises intensify and, shit, he thinks, this thing is going to start crying. And, why couldn’t it have been puppies?
The woman’s phone rings and, with all the grace of a new mother running on too few hours of sleep, in the process of reaching for it, her belongings begin to slip. She checks the display and lets out a noise of frustration and tries to shift the baby and her bags to answer, but Will is a crime scene analyst and he knows within moments that she is fighting a losing battle. Until, of course, her eyes zero in on him. He can hear the cogs in her head turning. In a desperate and immature move, he attempts telepathic communication – you do not want to give your baby to me. I am a stranger and I am un – she begins to step towards him – unstable. He considers escape routes and excuses but it is too late and she is upon him, already extending baby-occupied arms.
‘I’m so sorry, but I really need to take this. You wouldn’t mind?’ she smiles, encouraging, and the baby gurgles for good measure. ‘Normally I wouldn’t, but…’
Will is speaking before he is aware that it is happening and he is saying ‘No problem’ and internally he is screaming and suddenly the woman is gone and there is a baby, no more than a handful of months old, sitting in his arms.
His mind races.
Is this how you hold a baby? What if he drops it? He has seen dead babies before, cold and pale on metal tables, and oh shit, what if I accidentally kill it? But it has stopped shaking and where before he saw watering eyes and a wobbling mouth, he sees a wide, gummy grin and hears what can only be described as a placated vocalization. He shifts the thing experimentally in his arms and it giggles, fucking giggles, and reaches up at him.
Those chubby arms are now covered in drool and reaching up at his ears, his mouth, whatever they can access. He lets it muss up his hair and dribble all over him as he rests it against his chest and shoulder.
It is an odd feeling, quite literally holding a life in his hands. Not a life weighed down with baggage and afflictions and stressors like the people around him whose eyes he avoids, but a life unburdened and one from which enthusiasm and wonder escapes like water from the gaps between his fingers. He does not like people because they do not like him, are put off by his demeanour and the way he shifts under their gaze, views tainted by prior discussion and the eyes of diagnosticians. He likes some, countable on his fingers, who forgo clinical observation in favour of sheer curiosity (Hannibal) or see beneath the host of surface instabilities to whatever lies beneath, fragile as it may be (Alana). Jack is blunt and open, always an arm’s length away, and he will never understand why Beverly does not shy away in fear like the rest of them, but this child?
It does not know him and yet it loves him. Or, it loves everything. It is forceful but soft and more fragile than he but so much more resilient. And here it is, balling its fists up and trying to fit them in his ears.
He does not know how long he has been standing there with this baby, still and unsure and yet precariously at ease, but he does catch a flash of light through the glass.
Beverly is laughing soundlessly beyond the barrier, phone out. He already knows where that photo is going – straight to Alana, who will laugh and probably save it to taunt him with months from now. Beverly, thankfully, does not call over the boys, but she does shake her head, still radiating laughter.
She’d beg you to see it her way – Will Graham, tender to dogs and dogs alone, staring at a baby with abject horror and bewilderment. He Who Solves Murders held in complete paralysis by something as little and pure as a baby. It does not stop being funny. Ever.
At some point, the mother walks back in. She looks at him, suspicious at first, but then reaches to remove her child. As soon as it is back with her, the crying starts. Wails and shouts and noises that Will has never heard a human make. The woman is throwing him venom filled looks.
He doesn’t remember what he came here to tell Jack, but he’s sure it can wait.
* * * *
When he washes his hair that night, he is forced to spend an extra five minutes wrestling with the dried up slobber that coats the left side of his head. He finds traces of it in places he does not remember and cannot make sense of why they are there – his jaw line is stiff with the stuff and he is almost certain that the big damp patch on his shirt was not a spilled beverage. His dogs regard him with trepidation, off-put by the strange smell of someone or something.
Alana calls him that night.
At least, he thinks it is Alana. All he hears on the other end of the line is laughter.
He falls asleep to the sound of her voice between fits of giggles, catches words like ‘Of all the people in the world’ and ‘I wish I could have seen for myself”.
* * * *
It happens again at the dentist, a set of twins toddling away from their parents to attach themselves to each of his legs.
And then again, as he goes to meet Jack at the university. He counts three children, all too young to be classed as anything other than babies, reaching out to him or grabbing at his sleeves as they walk together between offices. Jack says nothing, because it is none of his business, but even Will can see the questions brewing just beneath the surface.
And then when he runs into a young family at the post office, the youngest dropping his attention from his stuffed toy to Will, in front of them in line.
And then it keeps happening.
He sleeps less and less, and starts losing time. One moment he is tossing in bed and the next his is clutching a small child in his arms, suddenly terrified that he has stolen it. The police let him off with a warning.
Hannibal is fascinated, equal parts disgusted with the traces of dribbled and drool that seem to hover on Will and intrigued by the possible reasoning behind the sudden onset. Will doesn’t like to discuss it.
He runs a constant fever and must look ill, if the looks that strangers shoot him are any indication. Babies seem less put off.
The whole situation seems too ridiculous to be believable, and yet it seems to be the least unlikely thing in his life.
* * * *
Will finds himself missing it, when his arms are empty. He stops instinctively flinching away from the small people inhabiting the prams. He’d deny it if you asked, but he has found himself on more than one occasion searching the internet for how best to hold small children and the different needs of babies in different developmental stages.
Alana says that he seems softer; Beverly asks him if he’s sure he is not a Disney princess. He buries his head in case files and ignores them, but can’t shake a sense of emptiness that he has never noticed before.
* * * *
Will Graham had been disillusioned with people. People, he could see, had unlimited potential for evil. People could to horrible things to strangers and even more horrible things to people they loved. People could seem good ad then send you spiraling with wicked deeds and awful acts. People were the most terrifying thing in the world, and he had always been wary of them, but now he found himself thinking.
When he felt these thoughts begin to surface, he would push them away. He wouldn’t entertain the idea of a child in his arms that wasn’t another person’s, a baby that loved him as more than a stranger with a bizarre targeted magnetism. A child that was his own. He thought about these things but then he stopped thinking about them, because thinking could be the most dangerous thing of all. And there were other things that needed thinking about instead.
But should tiny, balled up hands reach up towards him and should tiny, chubby legs squirm from under the arms of their parents and should, occasionally, he make a funny face at a child in a pram at the pharmacy, no one had to know. Even when life becomes a parade of hospital visits and medications and court hearings and murmured phrases, no one had to know.